Muso research found that the Beatles were the most pirated act online, with 187,687 files uploaded illegally. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

Imagine if you downloaded a file from an illegal filesharing site or cyberlocker and, when you tried to open it, you were greeted by a message saying something along the lines of: "You seem to like this artist, so if you want them to be able to make another record, please support them by buying their record." Would it make you more likely to pay for the music you consume?

This is the idea behind anti-piracy company Muso’s latest product. Having received a government grant to develop the technology, it enables illegal downloaders to go legal. Instead of just removing the illegal file, the company uploads a preview of the track, with a message attached, saying something like: “If you steal this record, maybe the artist won’t get a chance to make a second record …”

The music fan then has an option to legalise the copy by purchasing the file – or, if they don’t want to do that, get redirected to a legal site where they can access it, such as Spotify or Deezer. “It’s basically using piracy as a retail platform,” says company co-founder Andy Chatterley.

It also contains an educational element, something he thinks is important. “I’ve always hated the approach of sending legal letters to kids,” he explains. “In my opinion, it’s stupid. The thought that a law firm that has no relation to the creator sends out a letter saying that you’ve downloaded something and have to pay £500 is horrendous.”

Fleetwood Mac is the second most pirated act, with 72,984 uploaded files, according to Muso. Photograph: Owen Sweeney/Rex Features

Playing whack-a-mole

Google has received more than 100m takedown notices for links to copyright-infringing web pages over the past few years – with 44m of them sent by record label association BPI in 2013. Many, on both sides of the copyright debate, view this as a sign that the system is broken. Some tech companies and blogs claim the BPI and RIAA (its US counterpart), two of the top filers, are overwhelming Google with millions of notices in order to put pressure on the corporation. BPI and the RIAA, on the other hand, point out that they wouldn’t have to send so many notices if Google filtered out the sites that cause it to receive tens of thousands of takedown notices every month.

But Chatterley thinks the system is working. Counting independent music companies such as Beggars Group, [PIA] and Demon Music Group as clients, Muso sends out “crawlers” to billions of web pages featuring unlicensed music, constantly searching for rights-holders’ work, adding any links they find to their clients’ dashboard. If the client agrees that the site is unlicensed and the file should be removed, Muso sends takedown notices, and the file will usually be removed within hours.

'It feels like being burgled'

Chatterley, who is a Grammy-nominated songwriter and producer, says the idea for the company came to him in 2009 when an album he had been working on popped up all over the internet 10 days before its release date. “I saw it on my Google alerts,” he recollects. “I knew about Napster and Limewire, but I didn’t really understand cyberlocker and torrent mentality.

“The only thing I could do was remove it manually, looking at each site’s Digial Millenium Copyright Act policy, understand their form, find the URL of the place I found the file ... it would take 20 minutes to half an hour per file – and that was just from the Google alerts, it didn’t include whatever links Google hadn’t picked up on,” he sighs.

“It’s really, really, really frustrating from a writer and producer perspective, considering the whole process of making an album: You decide to make an album, then you start rehearsing, then recording, from that to checking the artwork, it’s a whole year process. And then you’re hoping for a chart position, wanting the demand to build up towards the release, and then, before you even get there, it’s available [on these illegal sites]. It’s like being robbed.

“I never try to get too far into the debate about piracy, whether it’s good or bad – it’s bad – but when you actually work making music, and that’s the only thing you do, then it is like being broken into and everything being taken away.”

Muso’s technology does not use audio fingerprinting, as Chatterley thinks it isn’t robust enough. Instead, its algorithm looks at a variety of things, including the artist’s name, what kind of website it’s on and the file name.

He says the vast majority of sites Muso targets co-operate. Some of them have even given the company access to their systems, allowing Muso to take the files down itself, in order to save time and effort.

The cost for the clients can be as little as £12 a month to monitor the whole catalogue of an artist, says Chatterley.

HBO shows like True Detective are said to be under-protected from copyright infringement. Photograph: JIm Bridges/AP

But Muso doesn’t just work with artists and labels – it also works with TV companies, especially sports broadcasters. But aren’t they quite good at taking down their broadcasts from YouTube? “Some are,” concedes Chatterley. “We work with a big network in Portugal, and they’re good. Others are not. You can pretty much get any Premier League match now on YouTube. People advertise it on Twitter. The problem is that most of it comes from abroad, from Spain or ESPN in the US.”

He says TV companies such as HBO are ridiculously under-protected, despite it being relatively easy for a company such as Muso to remove the illegal files from cloud lockers and torrent sites.

Having tracked down and taken down 85m files for its clients, the company estimates it has saved them £500m in revenue – and that’s when the estimation is that only one out of every 500 illegal downloads would equate to a lost sale or stream.

Some would argue that the reason Muso thinks the takedown notice system works is because it makes money from it.

Yet £12 a month may feel a bit steep for a songwriter when it equals hundreds of thousands of streams on your royalty statement.

And perhaps that's the most detrimental effect of piracy – how it has devalued music by making it impossible for legal music services to charge a fair market rate. Record labels and digital music services, including Spotify, are operating in a skewed market, forced to compete with free, with prices forced down to as close to free as possible – or even completely free. The question is if that damage can ever be undone, even with education.